WordPress for Startups

1. WordPress for Startups August 18, 2013, Hub Tel Aviv By: Miriam Schwab Follow us: facebook.com/illuminea Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

2. Who am I? • Friendly CEO of illuminea • 100+ WordPress sites • 7+ years with WP • Local WordCamp organizer for 3 yrs. • 200+ blog post on using WordPress and online marketing • Speaker at SMX Israel, WordCamp Europe and more Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

3. Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

7. Source: The State of the Word and Elegant Themes Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

8. The web WordPress Other

9. Possible sub-header THE PROCESS Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

10. Planning WordPress Theme Install & Configure Content/ Marketing QA Launch Just the beginning…

11. PLANNING Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

12. Goals – Why? • • • • • • • • Signup for beta Signup for trial Newsletter subscribers Contact Us Brand awareness, PR Test product viability Get customer feedback Customer support Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

13. Goals – Who? • Potential customers • Potential investors • Press / Media / Bloggers Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

14. Wireframe Logo Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

15. Wireframe tools • • • • • • • Wirify – turn any site into a wireframe Powerpoint/Photoshop/Illustrator Wireframe.cc Mockingbird Gliffy Balsamiq Mockflow Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

16. DESIGN YOUR SITE, OR PICK A THEME Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

17. DESIGN YOUR SITE, OR PICK A THEME Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

18. But first! Your brand Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

19. What is your brand? • • • • Logo – colors, style Playful? Serious? Enterprise? Consumer? Technological? Friendly? Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

21. This theme sets the new standard with endless possibilities lots of awesome features. SEO base built-in multiple header designs to choose from…choose from boxed and wide mode unlimited colors, 5 amazing sliders, advanced portfolio and blog options, lots of shortcodes, custom widgets advanced typography options, over 20+ PSDs included Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

22. What to look for • • • • • • • • • • Service/support How is the homepage structured? Internal page Main blog page Individual blog page Category/tag/author/search Built-in SEO? Bad! <h1>, <title> Responsive Uses WP navigation Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

23. What you can know Not everything. There will be surprises like: • Bugs • Missing features • Bad service • Deprecated functions Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

24. Good theme providers Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

25. HOSTING Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

26. What to look for • • • • • • • WP experts Updated version of PHP Great amazing stupendous service Backups Cloud = nonsense Uptime = nonsense GoDaddy = Big no no Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

27. WordPress Managed Hosting Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

28. Shameless Plug Illuminea provides managed hosting for WordPress sites. Includes: • • • • Upgrades Backups Technical support And more. More info: http://illumineahost.com/ and http://illuminea.com/services/wordpress-hosting-maintenancesupport/ Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

29. Other options • • • • Bluehost Dreamhost Site5 Hostgator Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

30. INSTALL AND CONFIGURE Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

31. Delete “admin” Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

32. Site title & tagline Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

33. Email for notifications Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

34. No subscribers: Settings > General – Security! Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

35. Settings > Reading Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

36. Settings > Discussion Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

37. Settings > Permalinks Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

38. PLUGINS Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

39. How to choose a plugin

40. Keep an eye on your plugins Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

41. Important plugins • Jetpack: social buttons, photo gallery, auto-post to social networks • Gravity Forms • Spam Destroyer (Akismet alternative) • WordPress SEO • WooSidebars • Backups – BackupBuddy, BackWPup, VaultPress, ManageWP Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

42. Nice to haves • • • • • • • • CMS Tree Page View Gravity Forms to Zoho CRM Redirection Limit login attempts Tiny MCE Advanced Scroll Triggered Box Swiftype search Wordfence Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

43. RESPONSIVE DESIGN Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

44. “…the number of smartphones in use worldwide reached 1.038 billion units during the third quarter of 2012.” Source: Strategy Analytics, as quoted here. Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

46. When Facebook and Google developers plan new features and products, they think of the mobile experience before the desktop experience. Source: Bruce Clay, June 2012 Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

47. Google Google supports smartphone-optimized sites in three configurations: 1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google's recommended configuration. 2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device. 3. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs. Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

48. Why according to Google • Easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to your content • helps Google's algorithms assign the indexing • No redirection needed to get to deviceoptimized view, reduces loading time properties for the content • User agent-based redirection is error-prone • It saves resources for both your site and Google's crawlers: Googlebot user agents needs to crawl your pages once, as opposed to crawling multiple times with different user agents, to retrieve your content Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

49. Why according to me • Branding • Easier to manage and maintain • More links to one URL - vast majority of mobile URLs do not have inbound links (Bing blog) Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

50. So what is it? Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

51. Minimum 2 Breakpoints Mobile @media only screen and (min-device-width : 320px) and (max-device-width : 480px) { /* Styles */ } Tablets @media only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and (max-device-width : 1024px) { /* Styles */ } Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

52. Mobile Breakpoints Mobile Portrait @media only screen and (max-device-width : 320px) { /* Styles */ } Mobile Landscape @media only screen and (min-device-width : 321px) { /* Styles */ } Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

53. Tablet Breakpoints Tablet Portrait @media only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and (max-device-width : 1024px) and (orientation : portrait) { /* Styles */ } Tablet Landscape @media only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and (max-device-width : 1024px) and (orientation : landscape) { /* Styles */ } Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

54. Landscape @media screen and (min-device-width: 480px) and (orientation: landscape) { body { font-size: 100%; } } Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

55. Page Load Just 1 second of load time can drop conversion by 7%. (Source) • Conditional loading – if certain conditions met, content (images, media) is loaded • Lazy loading - load media after the initial page load Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

56. http://responsive.victorcoulon.fr/ Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

57. http://responsive.is/ Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

58. http://quirktools.com/screenfly/ Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

59. http://responsinator.com/?url=commtouch.com Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

60. SECURITY Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

61. Pretty simple • • • • • • • • Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade Hosting No admin user, low user levels Good passwords! “ilovemydog” = #fail Close admin to subscribers Backup regularly off server – Amazon File permissions Be careful with plugins and themes delete what you don’t need Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

62. PROMOTION Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

63. Semantic Data Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

65. More on-site optimization • • • • • • Breadcrumbs Pagination XML Sitemap Google Data Highlighter Google Analytics Google Webmaster Tools Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

66. Getting WP Help • • • • • ‫וורדפרס בפייסבוק‬ ‫וורדפרס הקבוצה החדשה בפייסבוק‬ WordPress support forums WPGarage Fantasktic - $99 per task Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea

67. illuminea http://illuminea.com ▪ http://wpgarage.com @miriamschwab ▪ http://facebook.com/miriamschwab Slides available at http://illum.in/ourpresentations THANKS! Follow us! facebook.com/illuminea